Still Waiting for Trump to Stop H-1Bs from Replacing U.S. Workers

The H-1B visa program is designed to replace Americans with cheap, foreign workers. For decades, employers have replaced hundreds of Americans at a time using H-1B visas. Whether the result of corporate control (e.g., Amazon over the Washington Post or Disney over ABC) or political correctness, the nation's elite media largely ignore this issue and refuse to report on cases when Americans are replaced.

A break in the media blackout came in 2015 when Julia Preston of the New York Times reported that Disney had replaced 250 Americans with cheap, foreign workers imported on H-1B visas.

Preston followed up with a few more articles on the H-1B disgrace, but she retired and the New York Times has resumed its blackout on the issue.

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" producers obtained shocking documents from the training courses. Powerpoint slides with the AT&T and Accenture logos inform workers about Indian cultural customs and mention that Indian men will not shake hands with American women. AT&T also gives its soon-to-be-former employees a list of "approved topics" for discussion and urges them not to discuss India's religious conflicts or human rights record with their future replacements.

Keep in mind that when companies replace Americans using H-1B visas that this is not abuse; this is the system working as it is intended. Congress explicitly made it legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers. Congress made it legal to pay H-1B workers at the bottom one-sixth of wages. No company has ever been legally punished for replacing Americans with H-1B workers.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump campaigned with former Disney workers and promised he would do something about the use of H-1B visas to replace Americans.

Trump has had the ability to put an end to Disney-style replacements of Americans with the stroke of his pen — but we are still waiting.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.